Books: Cracked Alabaster

THE YOUNG HAMILTON, A BIOGRAPHY by James Thomas Flexner Little, Brown;
497pages; $15

Like Hamlet and Polonius interpreting the shapes of clouds,
psychohistorians tend to find whatever emotional apparitions they need
to prove a thesisas if the Third Reich, for example, could be
explained by little Hitler's toilet training. Fortunately, Historian
James T. Flexner is temperate and plausible enough in his
psychologizing about the young Alexander Hamilton to offer a
fascinating new analysis of a precocious and odd career.

His earlier biographers, often hagiolatrous in their enthusiasm for
Hamilton, have known that he was born illegitimate in the Leeward
Islands of the West...